Wednesday, 6 January 2016

“FUNERAL, n. A pageant
whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker..."

Ambrose
Bierce – The Devil’s Dictionary

The
most fascinating story in Brian Parsons’ book is of the extraordinary
shenanigans at the death of the celebrated illusionist, the Great Lafayette. Born Sigismund Neuberger in Munich in 1871 Lafayette
emigrated with his Jewish family to the United States when he was 19. He took
to the stage, initially as a professional quick change artist but slowly
started to incorporate magic tricks into his act. He became close to another
struggling magician on the vaudeville circuits, Erik Weisz, who later became
better known by his stage name, Harry Houdini. It was Houdini who presented
Neuberger with the love of his life, a little dog called Beauty who completely reciprocated
her masters feelings and couldn’t bear to be parted from him, even when he was
on stage.Lafayette made her a fixture
of his act, teaching her small parts in his magic routines and with Beauty at
his side success suddenly came to the magician and he became one of the biggest
box office draws in America.

Neuberger
moved to London, where he set up home in swish Tavistock Square and became the
highest paid magician on the circuits, earning £40,000 a year, taking bookings
up to ten years in advance and employing a team of 40 to help stage his
elaborate illusions. Despite the many temptations that women offer the hugely
successful man, Beauty remained his one true love. Outside his house hung a
plaque declaring “the more I see of people, the more I love my dog.” And inside
the house visitors were greeted with more printed encomiums ‘you may eat my
food, you may command my servants, but you must respect my dog’. An unshakeable rule of tragedy is that all
great loves are doomed and so it proved for Neuberger and Beauty. In 1911
Neuberger was in Edinburgh on the Scottish leg of a British tour.On Saturday 6 May, at their suite in the
Caledonian Hotel Beauty suddenly became ill. A veterinarian was hastily
summoned but before he could come to the aid of the stricken dog, she
died.Beauty’s distraught master somehow
persuaded the officials of Edinburgh’s Piershill Cemetery to allow him to bury
a dog in a white tiled vault designed for the reception of a human being.They did stipulate however that he must join
Beauty in the same vault when his term on earth finally came to a close. Neither
they nor the great Lafayette could have imagined just how soon that was to
be.

The Great Lafayette with Beauty

Neuberger
had his dog embalmed and laid him in state in a glass case in his hotel room
until the funeral scheduled for the following Wednesday. On Tuesday evening he
was back at the Empire Palace theatre in his role as the Great Lafayette,
performinghis pièce de résistance, the
Lions Bride in which he played the role of a sultan throwing a girl from his
harem into a lion’s den with a real lion.At the climax of the act the lion would pounce on the girl and then
reveal itself to shocked audience be the Great Lafayette himself dressed in a
lion skin. It was a complex piece of stage magic involving a genuine lion and a
double and some tricky lighting. It was the lighting that let Lafayette down
that night, a fuse blew, a short circuit overheated, a spark started a fire and
the fire engulfed the stage so quickly that 11 people burnt to death. The
audience, all 3000 of them, were safely evacuated from the building to the calming
accompaniment of the orchestra playing the national anthem. The Great
Lafayette’s body was found on stage, his identity confirmed by his manager and
several of the cast.Despite the tragedy
Beauty’s funeral went ahead as planned on the following day and further plans
were made for Lafayette to follow as soon as the formalities associated with
his death could be completed.But then a
few hours later a further body was discovered beneath the gutted stage at the
theatre, a body identified by theatre staff as belonging to Lafayette! His
solicitor was called up from London to resolve the confusion which he soon did
by identifying the second body as definitively belonging to his client and the
first body as belonging to Charles Richards, Lafayette’s stage double in the
Lions Bride illusion. Quite why no one had wondered where Richards was in the
aftermath of the fire has never really been explained but all’s well that ends
well and both men went to their rightful graves (we think). Lafayette’s body
was taken to Glasgow to be cremated and his ashes returned to Piershill to be
placed in the glass case, between Beauty’s paws, in the white tile lined vault.

Dead dog; "My Dearest Beauty - the passing has caused a wound that can never be healed"

Not
all of the author’s stories are quite as entertaining as this. A couple come
close, the bizarre story of the burial of Lord Kitchener’s empty coffin for
example, or his account, including a photo of the victim in his coffin, of the first
ever recorded hit and run accident in 1905 in which the four year old Willie Clifton
was left dead in the road outside his home in Hertfordshire. (The driver was
eventually tracked down and prosecuted. Convicted of manslaughter he was
sentenced to a mere six months in prison, so beginning the tradition of indulgent
leniency to killers in cars which continues down to the present day.) The stories sit slightly uncomfortably in a
rather sober account of the rise of the funeral industry professional from late
Victorian undertaker to post war funeral directors. Early chapters concern
themselves with the introduction of American embalming techniques in the early
1900’s, the formation of professional associations such as the British
Undertakers Association and the British Institute of Embalmers, and the
Cremation Society etc. We are given accounts of how the funeral industry coped
during the First World War and an interesting chapter on it dealt with the
Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 based on the author’s research in cemetery and
undertakers records in East London.The
rise of the Co-operative funeral service is given a chapter of its own and the author discusses in some detail the
part played by the industry in events of national significance such as the 1920
burial of the unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey and the R101 disaster. The first part of the book closes with
the Second World War.

The
second third of Mr Parsons book are an interesting selection from the authors collection
of images illustrating all aspects of the undertaker at work, photographs of funeral
parlours and other premises, coffins,
horse drawn, hand drawn and motor hearses, biers, funeral directors adverts,
the work of monumental masons and of funerals themselves. Brian Parsons was for
many years a funeral professional and is now a consultant in the industry
specialising in training and education. He has published many previous books
including the fourth edition of Hugh Mellers’ definitive work on the capitals burial
places “London Cemeteries; An illustrated Guide and Gazetteer.” His voice is always authoritative, he is definitely
a man who knows what he is talking about, but his professional background and I
suspect years of having to deal with raised eyebrows whenever he told anyone
what he did for a living, have made him perhaps overly respectful towards his
subject. His inclusion of the story of the demise of the Great Lafayette
clearly show a man drawn to the grotesque and bizarre (and surely no one
becomes professionally involved with the funeral trade who isn’t drawn to that aspect
of things in some way) but this side is suppressed in order to provide a reverent
account of the professional rise of the undertaking
business that at times carries no more emotional resonance than would the story
of chartered surveying or buildings insurance. This book is always interesting and well worth
reading but I would have appreciated a slightly less decorous account of the
business of corpse disposal.